Music

Love to play an instrument or sing? Fascinated by the complexity that makes music simultaneously intricate and powerful? The Music Department at Colby will give you opportunities to pursue your passion for music while enhancing your communication, analytic, writing, and reasoning skills.

Students work closely with professors—internationally recognized theorists, composers, performers, and musicologists—to investigate music in global, historical, and theoretical contexts. Courses encourage creative and critical thinking and emphasize music as an art form as well as a rigorous discipline. Students are exposed to music from a wide variety of past and present world cultures and can select courses in music history and theory, musicianship, performance, conducting, composition, world music, jazz history, American popular music, and African drumming.

The collaborative major in music and computation includes music and computer science courses allowing for focused study in computer-generated music and consideration of how it has shaped musical taste and culture.